The VR6 engine is a narrow-angle V6 engine, which could also be described as a staggered-inline six-cylinder piston engine. The VR6 is designed to fit within the confined engine bay of a front-wheel drive compact car. It is very short in length compared to an inline-six engine, because the cylinders are staggered, even cylinders moved forward, odd cylinders moved backward, but all contained in one cylinder bank, to reduce the length. Joining two such designs together into a W engine creates a design that is much shorter than an inline engine with the same number of cylinders, but not too much wider. Volkswagen Group's W12 engines utilise two VR6-like sets of cylinders mated at 72 degrees, and the W8 engine consisted of two VR4 engines at the 72-degree angle. In the W16, each side is made up of two VR8 banks and the 'bank' angle is increased to 90 degrees. The narrow angle of each set of cylinders allows just two overhead camshafts to drive each pair of banks, so just four are needed in total. For this reason, the engine is sometimes described as a WR16.

Note that this design differs from the triple-bank W18 engine that Volkswagen produced for concept cars of 1998 and 1999.